


on a wing and a prayer

by Origamidragons



Series: oh, what a lovely day! (everyone's a goddamn junker au) [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everybody's a Goddamn Junker, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Canon-Typical Violence, Childhood, Gen, Inspired by Mad Max Series (Movies), Junkertown (Overwatch), Sort of? - Freeform, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-09 18:25:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13487154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Origamidragons/pseuds/Origamidragons
Summary: on a wing and a prayer:with only the slightest chance of successOr: Fareeha Amari was raised in a world of ashes.





	on a wing and a prayer

ثلاثة - _Three_

Fareeha Amari was three when her world ended, and her earliest memory was of fire. She was in a truck, bouncing as the rattletrap wheels bumped over the uneven ground, held against her mother’s chest almost tight enough to hurt. 

“ _Go!_ ” her mother was shrieking at Uncle Jack in the driver’s seat, her usual cool composure nowhere to be seen. “ _We have to get out of the-_ ”

Fire bloomed on the horizon, white and blue and red, a deadly flower reaching up into the clear, endless sky. Fareeha, her head supported on her mother’s shoulder, had a clear view out the rear window, and her mouth opened in a small, startled gasp as she reached out a hand.

It was almost beautiful. 

“...blast zone,” her mother finished in a whisper, craning her head to look over her shoulder, horror writ large across her face. 

Then everything went white.

سبعة - _Seven_

Fareeha was raised in a world of ashes. 

She barely remembered what it had been like before, only fuzzy, half-formed images that were there and gone in the blink of an eye. Her mother was never willing to tell her about it, either. About where they’d come from, and the way things had been there. 

Reinhardt, though, was an excellent storyteller, and whenever her mother was safely out of range, she used to climb into his lap and ask, in her bastard accent that wasn’t quite Egyptian and wasn’t quite Australian, for him to tell her what it had been like, the place where they had come from. The old knight, smiling with a sadness she wasn’t used to seeing on him, obliged. 

He told her stories of glittering cities and great battles, of clear water and unbroken glass, metal so shiny and new you could see your reflection in it. He told her about the war if she prodded him, though she could never get him to tell her in too much detail no matter how she pled.

“It was a horrible time,” he told her in his rumbling earthquake voice, staring through her at a time long past, “but it was a time for heroes. It brought out the best in people, gave them something to _fight_ for!” 

He sighed heavily, sounding every one of his years, and ruffled her hair. She squeaked in protest and tried to squirm away, ducking out from under his oversized hand, rough and strong and worn from countless battles. 

“Not anymore,” he finally said. “This isn’t a place for heroes. But! We still try the best we can, yes? Your mother, your uncles, myself. We try hard to make the world the best place we can for you, little falcon. ” 

Fareeha was silent for a moment. The silence that fell between them was heavy and mournful, and she wanted to break it, to move onto less painful topics. 

“I asked Torbjorn to make me a rocket launcher,” she eventually said, startling a rumbling chuckle out of the mountain of a man. 

“Is that so? What did he say?” 

Fareeha scrunched up her face unhappily, not needing to fake the disappointment writ large on her face. “He said maybe when I’m older.”

Reinhardt laughed, loud and long, and Fareeha felt relieved as the pressure in the room abruptly faded. “Perhaps! Now, why don’t you go play with your friends, hm? Jesse and Olivia were looking for you.” 

Fareeha startled to her feet, tumbling off of Reinhardt’s lap. “Oh, right! I said I’d show them the best hide-and-seek spots!” 

She bolted out of the small, dusty room. “ _Bye, Reinhardt!_ ” she called over her shoulder, and a fond, gentle smile graced the huge man’s face. 

His eyes, as they always did in these silent moments, slid involuntarily towards the corner, where what was left of his armor sat. It was barely recognizable anymore, having been haphazardly repaired dozens of times with whatever scrap metal was available. The original carbon alloy was patched together with steel, brass, and iron, the patchwork metal catching the weak, dusty sunlight through the window and glittering a dozen different colors. 

Perhaps one day, he’d have reason to wear it again.

عشرة - _Ten_

“Umi?” Fareeha asked quietly, eyes fixed upwards. It was a rare clear day, with none of the dust storms that were routine in the wastes, and the sky was blue, blue, blue, as infinite as an ocean she’d never seen. Her mother glanced up from her position peering through the scope to look down at her, brow furrowed. 

“What is it, habibti?” 

“What’s it like to fly?” 

Her mother froze for a fraction of a second, and there was something so immeasurably sad in her gaze that Fareeha though she wouldn’t answer, and she regretted saying anything at all. 

“People can’t fly, little one,” she said after a long pause, bending to look through the rifle scope again, scanning the hard-packed outback for any threats. “We’re not birds.” 

“Reinhardt said you used to be able to, though,” Fareeha pressed in a way she normally wouldn’t dare to. The sky was so beautifully blue. “He said people used to be able to just… fly to different cities. That they could see the world from up high, just like birds.” 

“Reinhardt,” Ana replied, a snapping bite to her voice, “needs to get his head out of the clouds every now and then and stop living in the past. Best keep your wits about you and your feet on the ground, where they belong.” 

There was no response from Fareeha, but Ana heard her footsteps rattling down the rickety wooden stairs in the quick, forceful way that meant she was upset. She wanted to go after her daughter, to explain better, to apologize, but she didn’t look away from her post. 

Someone had to keep the watch. 

All of this was for Fareeha, this city they’d scavenged together from dirt and rust. She didn’t want to raise her daughter in this world of death and dust, but it was the best they were going to get, now, after they had lost everything else. She prayed that someday, her daughter would understand that… and yet something inside her flinched away from the image of a Fareeha that had stopped dreaming. 

Over her head, the sky spanned an endless expanse, restless and waiting and so very blue.

ثلاثة عشر - _Thirteen_

Nothing in Junkertown was truly _clean_ , ever, the dust and sand got into every corner and crevice, but Angie’s infirmary was probably as close as it got. The windows were firmly sealed shut and Torbjörn had even helped her set up an airlock-style double-door in order to avoid contamination. 

And yet, Fareeha mused, running a finger along the inside of the warped glass of the window and seeing it come away dirty, the dust _still_ got everywhere. 

The layered doors slid open and closed, first one and then the other, and Angela Ziegler, the only remotely qualified doctor in Junkertown, nineteen years old and with dark circles carved under her eyes, gave her a tired but warm smile. She wore a tattered lab coat patched with half a dozen different colors, her messy blonde hair tied back with a piece of twine. Her eyes were as blue as the sky on the clearest days. Fareeha felt her cheeks get hot immediately, and ducked her head to hide it, along with the blossoming bruise forming around her eye. 

“Hi, Angie,” she muttered. 

“Hey, Fareeha,” Angela replied, sounding sympathetic. “Gabe told me you got into a bit of a fight, huh?” 

She shrugged sullenly, still looking down at the shattered tiles in the floor. “It wasn’t that big a deal. He makes everything sound worse than it really is.” 

“Fareeha,” Angela pressed, sounding more serious, more insistent. “Look at me.” 

Fareeha hesitated. 

“Fareeha.” 

She sighed, and looked up, meeting Angela’s eyes. She knew she didn’t look good. Her right eye was swollen almost shut, her nose might not have been _broken_ but it was definitely a little tweaked at least, and there was a trail of bruises forming down along her jawline. Angela looked her over with a clinical, nonjudgmental eye, and Fareeha felt a little bit of the nervous tension run out of her shoulders. 

“Alright,” Angela finally said with a firm nod. “Nothing too bad, then. This is all fixable. Hold still.” 

Angela reached out before Fareeha could protest and gave her nose a quick twist, snapping the cartilage back into place with professional precision. Fareeha couldn’t stop a startled shriek from escaping, but after a moment she realized that the throbbing, ugly pain in her face had receded, and sighed in relief. 

“...thanks, Angie,” she muttered, and the young doctor grinned for a brief moment, lighting the small infirmary with her smile, before her expression dropped back into solemnity. 

“You’re welcome. Now. Doctor’s orders are this,” Angela started, walking over to the small, battered refrigerator near the door and opening the door. Fareeha savored the brief rush of frigid air that washed over her as Angela rummaged around inside and eventually came up with a small, lumpy plastic bag and tossed it underhand to her. Fareeha caught it easily, but nearly dropped it when the cold shocked her fingers. 

“Hold that on your eye for the rest of the day, it’ll help with the swelling.”

Fareeha nodded obediently and pressed the bag against her face. The lumpiness and the plastic were uncomfortable, but the radiating cold was instantly soothing, and as she slid off the makeshift bed she’d been sitting on she managed a small smile, even though she couldn’t move her face too much without it hurting. 

“Bye, Angela,” she said, waving at the doctor with her free hand, who waved back until the inner door closed between them. 

The outer door opened, and her uncle Gabriel was waiting outside, leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his chest. Fareeha’s heart sunk. She was hoping he’d just drop her off and leave, and she’d be able to avoid a lecture, but it seemed like that wouldn’t be the case. She shifted uneasily on her feet and considered making a break for it, but discarded the idea as soon as it surfaced. 

So she straightened her back, pulled the icepack away from her face, glared up at him with her one visible eye, and waited for him to start scolding her.

He didn’t. 

Instead, he looked her up and down as though assessing her, nodded like he was satisfied with what he saw, and said, “Once that swelling goes down, come find me and I’ll teach you how to throw a punch properly.”

Fareeha _stared._ It was so far from what she had been expecting him to say that she started to shake her head before she caught herself. “ _What?_ ”

“I’m not mad at you for fighting, kid,” he said, sighing. “You’re gonna have to fight, in your life. No way of avoiding it, no matter what your mom and Jack want to think. But so long as you’ll have to fight anyways, you’re gonna learn how to do it _right._ Okay?” 

A smile, wild and excited, broke across her face like sunrise, her dark eyes sparking. “Okay.”

تسعة عشر - _Nineteen_

Fareeha Amari was wearing a leather vest, cargo pants, and a pair of aviator sunglasses with a crack bisecting the left lens. There was a heavy duffel bag slung over one shoulder, unbalancing her slightly. The blue sky was splattered orange with clouds of dust, and a sandstorm was brewing on the far horizon. 

It was her nineteenth birthday. 

She looked over her shoulder, the rising winds blowing her braids around her face, and saw Junkertown far behind her. They were probably far enough away now, she decided, and let the duffel bag slide off of her shoulder and thud against the dry packed earth with no small measure of relief. At the sound of metal clanking together, Torbjörn scowled up at her. 

“Chrissakes, girl, be careful with that!” he snapped. “I spend all this time making you a nice present and that’s how you treat her?”

Fareeha winced, thinking of endless hours spent digging through the scrap piles and ruined buildings for just the right parts and ferrying them back to Torbjörn so he could assemble them, piece by painstaking piece. “Sorry.”

“I’ll forgive it ‘cause it’s yer birthday,” Torbjörn continued, “but don’t think I won’t take her back if I catch you mistreatin’ her! You gotta be gentle with yer weapons. Like you would with a w- a good friend, you hear?” 

Fareeha raised her hands towards the orange-striped sky in surrender, a smile tugging at her lips. “I promise.” 

He narrowed his one eye skeptically at her before nodding, apparently satisfied with her sincerity. “Alright. What do you say we test this lovely lady out, then, eh?” 

He didn’t have to tell her twice- she was already on her knees, fighting with the dust-clogged zipper for a moment before wrestling it open. The duffel bag fell away, revealing an ugly, twisted lump of welded metal. She reached out with one hand and ran her fingertips across it, over the scars of melted steel laid across the surface, cool against her skin. 

“It’s beautiful,” she breathed, captivated, and saw Torbjörn straighten with pride out of the corner of her eye. 

“Damn right,” he grunted. “Now. Get ready.”

She slipped her hands beneath the metal and gently lifted it, straining to heft it into her arms before cradling it like a child. She wore a grin that felt large enough to break her face in two. She flipped the hinged panel open on the top and looked down at the projectiles inside, each smaller than her hand but filled with enough power to rock a building on its foundation. She closed the panel, satisfied with her ammunition, and braced the weapon against her shoulder. 

“Aim,” Torbjörn ordered, and she nodded. There was a lone tree silhouetted against the sky, and she set her sights on the withered bark and irradiated leaves, laying a finger on the trigger. 

Time slowed, and her heartbeat was suddenly very loud in her ears. Excitement burst through her chest.

“ _Fire!_ ” 

_Click._

For a fraction of a second, there was nothing. 

Then the rocket was flying-

-and then there was a shattering explosion, and where the tree had been there was nothing but a fragmented trunk that looked like it had been struck by lighting. The air was full of fluttering scraps of smoldering bark. 

Fareeha shrieked in triumph and punched her free hand towards the sky, towards the endless, nameless blue.

اثنين و عشرون - _Twenty-Two_

“ _Duck!_ ” Fareeha screamed, voice cracking from the sheer volume she put into the shout, and Jesse immediately dove for the ground and clapped his hands over his head. Fareeha took only a fraction of a second to aim before she pulled hard on the trigger and the raider taking aim at Jesse’s head exploded into bloody pieces, the miniature explosion momentarily deafening her. 

Jesse somersaulted forwards onto his feet and snapped off a shot of his own over Fareeha’s shoulder, and she glanced behind her to see another attacker that had been creeping up on her slump to the ground, a perfect bullet hole in the center of his forehead. 

“Can’t you use something with a lil’ more finesse?” Jesse grumbled good-naturedly. “My ears’ll be ringing all day now.” 

Fareeha rolled her eyes, half-smiling, as she knelt down to rifle through the dead outlaw’s pockets, coming away with a few precious bullets and some lint. It was far from the first time they’d had this argument. “Maybe when you use something that actually does some damage,” she shot back as she pulled the knife from the corpse’s hand and tucked it into her belt. 

“ _Perdón, hermana_?” Jesse’s indignant voice came from behind her, and she stifled a laugh. “Just because _my_ gun doesn’t put people in _pieces_ \- see if I save your ass next time-” 

The threat was empty, and they both knew it. She eventually concluded her search of the body and got to her feet, casting her gaze around the interior of the bombed-out hospital they’d been scavenging when the raiders had attempted to ambush them. Key word being _attempted_. 

“We done here?” Jesse asked, apparently having the same thought that she was, as she opened the battered knapsack that carried their findings and rifled through the contents to ensure nothing had been damaged- or at least, more damaged than it had been- in the fight. 

“Syringes,” she muttered, half to herself, “stethoscope, every bottle we could find that still rattled. I think that’s everything Angie asked for.”

Jesse didn’t respond, and when she looked up, she didn’t see him. She could hear his booted footsteps against the ancient tiles somewhere nearby. 

“‘Reeha! Come look at this!” his heavily accented voice suddenly called from the hallway, 

Puzzled, she followed the noise, and found him staring at-

“Are you kidding me?” she asked, baffled. 

“Hell, no! We gotta get this bad boy open,” Jesse said, gesturing emphatically at the dusty vending machine. He swiped a hand across the dirty plastic window to clean it and squinted inside to examine the contents. “They got Cheetos in here! I always said those things would survive the end of the world.”

Fareeha raised her eyebrows doubtfully, eyeing the ancient contraption. “ _Umi_ said to come back as soon as we’d gotten what we needed.”

“I feel like this qualifies as a necessity,” Jesse objected, unholstering his resolver again and taking aim at the padlock that held the front of the vending machine shut. One clean, snapping shot, echoing through the silence of the ruined hospital, and the padlock clattered to the ground. 

Fareeha had never had real chocolate before. It was twenty years old and stale as cardboard. 

She savored every bite.

ثمانية وعشرين - _Twenty-Eight_

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the catastrophic explosion of the Melbourne Omnium, the United Nations designated a team of soldiers, scientists, and researchers in full hazmat gear to venture to the locked-down continent and assess the situation there. They came by boat, and some of the researchers, acutely aware of the myriad dangers of radiation, refused to even step onto the soil. 

Those that dared to venture into the lawless wasteland made it an hour before they were surrounded. One minute they were alone, and the next, figures dressed in metal and tattered cloth, the abandoned and dispossessed children who’d been left to die on a toxic continent half a century before, appeared out of the wastes, circling around them. From the lip of the canyon, the barrel of a sniper’s rifle glinted in the sun. 

The woman who stepped forward from the pack to address them wore crudely fashioned leather armor over a grease- and blood-stained white t-shirt and cargo pants. Her hair was tied into a mess of braids and beaded with spent bullet casings, the brass glinting in the dusty sunlight. In her right hand she casually and fearlessly hefted a homemade rocket launcher, as though it weighed nothing. 

“Nice to meet you,” she said, her smile sharp and dangerous as a knife, her accent not quite Australian and not quite Egyptian, but instead something in between. “I’m Fareeha Amari. Welcome to Australia.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! First of all, if you're reading my dumb AU you're the best and I love you a lot, thank you so much.
> 
> Notes:  
> -There's gonna be lots more stories set in this universe! I'm currently planning one with Lucio and Symmetra, and one with McCree and Sombra.  
> -Not everybody is the age they are in canon, because Overwatch's timelines are a mess.  
> -Inspirations for this AU include the Mad Max movies and D.va's Junker skins.  
> - _Please_ feel free to ask me any questions you may have about this AU, either in the comments or on Tumblr at @oriigami.
> 
> Translations:  
> - _Umi_ : Arabic for 'mom'  
> - _Habibti_ : Arabic, feminine form of 'my darling'  
> - _Perdón, hermana?_ : Spanish for 'excuse me, sister?'


End file.
